IoT Group Defines Comms Spec

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Aiming to ease the fragmentation in the emerging Internet of Things, a group founded by Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, and Samsung will create a specification for device-to-device communications. The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) sees its work as most directly competing with the AllSeen effort started by Qualcomm.

The OIC is the latest of many geared to link IoT devices to each other or the cloud. Another consortium is expected to announce a more narrowly focused effort this month.

For its part, the OIC plans to release this fall an implementation of open-source code targeting home and office devices and a general specification by early 2015. Versions for automotive, healthcare, and industrial markets will follow. It will also create a compliance test for vendors that want to develop their own code based on the spec.

"The developer community needs a consistent and secure way to develop apps that incorporate peer-to-peer communications," says Gary Martz, a product line manager in Intel's wireless group, spearheading OIC. "Device-to-device methods are cropping up in an ad hoc manner, especially in places like China.

"We've talked to Tier 1 companies in each vertical market and asked what's needed for a single solution we can all support. Generally everyone agreed what's missing is a standards-based approach along with open-source implementation of it."

The connectivity spec will support authentication and be independent of any specific processor, network, or operating system. But the group is not yet prepared to say just what the spec and software will support or terms of joining the group or using its code.

Intel will contribute to the effort its XMPP-based Common Connectivity Framework, software for making device-to-device links over WiFi or Bluetooth. Broadcom and Samsung also will contribute existing code to the effort, Martz told us.

Unlike the OpenWSN open-source code, the OIC's approach will include an object model for software developers, and it will not be based solely on Internet Protocol. Compared to AllSeen, Martz says, the OIC approach will provide more support for vertical markets beyond the home and more security functions such as authentication.

"OIC aims to make [IoT device connectivity] easy for developers and OEMs."

The group hopes to announce later this summer more members, as well as terms for joining and using its work.

>Is a devcie-to-device spec what you need?>I note UPnP is working on a device to>cloud spec.

There are 10+ communication protocols in active development targeting iot applications. They are all very similar in technical aspects: plaintext protocols for structured data with extra features. Such protocols are only a common communication fabric, they do not define any schema for transmitted data or objects.

Say, there are 10 different smart thermometers from different brands that can see each other on the network, send data to each other, but the temperature data they send will be in 10 different incompatible formats.

Indeed, all you have to do is define the object name and object type then wrap it in some kind of format. You can do it in ASN.1(SNMP), TLV(RPC), XML(UPnP/SOAP), JSON(AJAX) or D-BUS(AllJoyn)... there are hundreds way to do the same thing. You can even invent new object schema easily and engieers love to invent stuff, even though there are lots of well-defined, implemented, tested then outdated, forgotton standards.